]]>http://humanepursuits.com/cast-a-poem/feed/0Tosha the Brave and the Peanut Butter Sockshttp://humanepursuits.com/tosha-the-brave-and-the-peanut-butter-socks/
http://humanepursuits.com/tosha-the-brave-and-the-peanut-butter-socks/#commentsMon, 27 Jul 2015 12:47:22 +0000http://humanepursuits.com/?p=6060A little story of an adventure.

Once, there was a grown-up girl named Tosha-the-Brave. She was daring and adventurous, willing to take risks to find beauty and wildness. But there was one thing that Tosha did not like—did not like decidedly—and that was having wet feet.

Tosha often sallied forth on a quest by herself, or with a friend or two in tow. She would come home armed with pictures and tales of her treks. Her photos were exquisite, layered with vibrant colour in the contours of mountains or in shape-shifting clouds.

One such journey began like any other, up with the honey-coloured sunlight to get to a hiking trail in time to miss afternoon tempests. But though the story began like any other, it ended up being the tale of Tosha-the-Brave and the peanut butter socks.

Upon arriving in the wilderness of a majestic park, Tosha and Jody were anxious to stretch their legs on a long summer’s hike. Rounding a bend not far into their trek, floods of people were pouring down the path, calling the warning of there being far too much snow to pass. Undaunted, the girls went forth to see what white beast met their eyes and feet. They laughed to one another at the lowlanders, unused to higher elevations and snow in summer.

On they went, until the path shifted and seemed lost at the crossing of a stream. Perseverance and prayer brought them to the small footpath the trail had become. After meeting two groups of people who said the trail was impassible or impossible to find, Tosha-the-Brave and Jody-the-Tenacious decided to see what lay ahead. On and on they went, over rocks and snow, past glassy-clear mountain pools.

Knowing the trail from a previous hike, Tosha showed Jody where to scale a slope of snow, climb a rock face, and end up with a stunning view of mountains, alpine lakes, and a narrow canyon. Both adventurers stared, wonderstruck at the beauty all around them.

After timeless minutes, Jody, being hungry and very concerned about eating lunch, left Tosha to take photos, and fished out a peanut butter and honey sammich for snacking purposes. Tosha was soon lured into lunching on her own peanut butter and jelly sammich. As they chewed and looked, Tosha heard a great cracking noise and the two friends were in time to watch rushing snow pour like a cataract over the face of the mighty Notchtop. An avalanche! An avalanche like a monster of noise and snow for their very own eyes to see!

There was not enough light in the day for Jody and Tosha to stay and drink in all the bold beauty of the shimmering, rugged world around them. Reluctantly, they shouldered their packs (wherein Jody almost packed a chipmunk by mistake), tromped through melting snow up to their thighs, and re-joined the path below.

Some wandering tracks and then snow clear of prints—with no trail to be seen—were all that lay ahead. But Tosha-the-Brave had seen this trail in deep summer; she was not afraid of losing her way or not being able to pass. She lead the duo fearlessly, forging a path across snow fields (in shorts no less!), always steering the pair straight for the path.

Snow, snow, and more snow! It stung their hands and legs, making them bleed as if small shards of glass had cut them. Still, Tosha-the-Brave pressed forward and Jody-the-Tenacious followed. The lust of adventure and the thrill of the quest was upon them, they would not turn back now! For a mile or more they broke through untravelled snow, then came to a gushing river. There! Many tacks dented the snow. A group of hikers had come through that far at least, making the downward way easier to find and traverse.

By this time, Jody and Tosha had wrinkly-wet feet and socks from falling through the deep snow so often. At times, when the trail wasn’t a steep mound of snow, it was a shallow stream itself, running ever down to meet the snow-melt river below. Surely, surely the path would be dry soon, the girls would say. But it wasn’t. Then, upon dropping under a great canopy of pines and winding down to another lake, the trail became dirt—not snow, stream, or mud.

Tosha rejoiced, immediately proposing a break to change her socks and dry her feet. She did so, but Jody (the foolhardy, now) choose to wear her wet socks, as not only her socks but also her shoes were soaked through and through. Now what does one do with muddy-wet socks from crossing the great Western snow-fields? They put those smelly, soaked socks in their PB&J lunch bag, of course!

Tosha-the-brave knew this, immediately carrying out the plan. She was soon the possessor of peanut butter socks. While many think it is these peanut butter socks that make her able to walk through walls of snow and take all kinds of daring treks, Tosha knew that really, they only smelled funny when she took them out of the bag to wash them. She was bold and brave without them.

I confess this baffles me at times. I love friendship. I have been blessed with some incredible friendships. But every time I approach a situation where I will be meeting new people, I’m suddenly convinced that creating a new friendship is impossible.

How can we offer enough of themselves to create, grow, and maintain a new relationship (trust and vulnerability included)?

Good friendship is indeed art, and I am convinced that it might be the most dangerous, satisfying form of artwork.

I think the key here is that friendship takes creators—plural. It’s never a solitary creative act. When I envision the process of making new friends, I usually isolate my own efforts and think about how much I might have to try. But I forget that you can’t make a friendship by yourself. The other person must be invested, too.

Of all the arts, relationship is the most dependent on multiple creators. In Poetic Diction, Owen Barfield argues that the beauty and power of poetry is ultimately lost on the creator; he’s already seen the metaphor, so the “felt change” (which good poetry ought to convey) is limited to the observer. I think you can make this claim for many art forms. An artist may need to create to survive, but the creation is not only for him and his gratification—it’s for the observer. That is where the true power of most art rests.

Friendship is different. It doesn’t allow for such distance between the artists. It is a beautiful form of co-creation between at least two people. To create a beautiful friendship both parties must work on the relationship. They’re not just molding a piece of art; they are molding themselves and each other. And because they are being changed, and not simply conveying this change to others, they are full participants in the art.

The process of friendship makes both artists vulnerable. Each must trust the other to care as much about the creation as she does. When a painter puts his heart into a painting, he knows that he gave it his all, and if he didn’t, he knows it’s his own fault. Friendship, however, you create actively with another person, so if you put your heart into it and the other does not, the artwork will be deformed and broken. It’s a daunting risk. But when you do open yourself to creating a relationship, you are potentially opening yourself to creating the most beautiful and satisfying work of art.

Despite my own frequent doubts about new friendships, I see them forming everywhere. It’s beautiful to see two people finding a connection and building up a relationship together. Even as an outside observer, I can be changed by witnessing the art of good friendship.

And I think I have been changed by the art of friendship more than any other art in which I’ve participated.

]]>http://humanepursuits.com/creating-friendships/feed/0The Truth of the Tied Knothttp://humanepursuits.com/the-truth-of-the-tied-knot/
http://humanepursuits.com/the-truth-of-the-tied-knot/#commentsThu, 23 Jul 2015 12:56:46 +0000http://humanepursuits.com/?p=6096Perhaps we need to remember from time to time that it’s perfectly normal, and expected, to be wrestling most of the way.

We tried and tried to loosen the knots, //Thinking once we’re untangled we’ll be better off //But it’s these failures //And faults that hold us together…

I’m not sure why I’ve been let inside all these marriages. I’m no marriage counsellor.

The marriage that seems to have gone flat after becoming parents.

The challenging in-laws.

The frequent and long separations for work.

The major illnesses.

The infertility.

The tight finances.

The infidelity.

The premature birth.

When did I grow up and find that these are not things happening to my parents’ friends, things I’d hear about in passing, but now they are happening around us? And if these are the ones confiding in me, how many more are struggling?

Facebook tells of all the celebrations, the highs, the victories.

The weddings.

The births.

The house purchases.

The travels.

The accolades.

Only in the quiet, behind the curtains, do I hear about the truly painful lows. But there is something extraordinary and courageous about facing the truth, about dwelling on the reality and not just what we feel is worth presenting to the rest of the world.

Recently, at dinner with some girlfriends, I lightly asked one how her husband was doing adjusting to fatherhood. She unexpectedly opened up:

“I’d be lying if I said he was doing great.” She spoke of him with sympathy and frustration, understanding and disappointment.

She was so willing to acknowledge the reality, to not run away from the space of uncertainty. To acknowledge that her marriage, like most, sat somewhere on a spectrum between perfection and disaster. Even though I’m sure the last thing she felt was courageous, I wanted to tell her that I thought she was.

All around us are marriages making it, for better or worse. They’re generally quite young marriages – few of us have hit the five or ten year mark – but old enough that we’ve already hit serious bumps in the road.

Perhaps we need to remember from time to time that it’s perfectly normal, and expected, to be wrestling most of the way. Sometimes we wrestle more intensely or more painfully, or we wrestle with boredom, disappointment, lack of understanding. Sometimes we wrestle into unchartered and scary territory. Sometimes we wrestle to a solution, and other times we simply don’t. We put it on a shelf, and perhaps try to wrestle it again later. But as we wrestle, the knot gets tighter, for better or worse, as our lives get further and further wrapped together. The one flesh that we became when we said ‘I do’ grows of it’s own accord. The scar where we joined together is now just one mark on a body that only partially resembles the original two separate beings.

That is the truth of the tied knot.

We tried and tried to loosen the knots,Thinking once we’re untangled we’ll be better offBut it’s these failuresAnd faults that hold us together

Better or worse, but what else can we do?And better or worseI am tethered to you, if it’s not either of usTell me who are we fooling?

This beautiful tangle that’s bruising us blue.It’s a beautiful knot that we just can’t undo.Together we’re one but apartTell me who are we fooling?

‘Cause real love is hard loveIt’s all we haveIt’s a break-neck, train wreckIt’s all we have

– Brooke Fraser’s ‘Who Are We Fooling?’

_______

Lucy O’Donoghue is a graduate student in theology and public health, and lives in Bangkok, Thailand with her husband and baby boy. For more of her writing, visit Craic & Banter (www.craicandbanter.wordpress.com) or buy a copy ofChasing Misery: An Anthology of Essays by Women in Humanitarian Responses.

]]>http://humanepursuits.com/the-truth-of-the-tied-knot/feed/0Children Professinghttp://humanepursuits.com/children-professing/
http://humanepursuits.com/children-professing/#commentsWed, 22 Jul 2015 10:00:39 +0000http://humanepursuits.com/?p=6109How can children be nurtured into faith without being pressured?

My stomach wobbles. We’ve arrived at my parents’ house halfway through the week, and there are two days left for the vacation Bible school program at their church, two days for my daughters to participate.

I’m familiar with the ministry running it. “Do they try to get the kids to ask Jesus into their hearts?” I ask my sister, whose kids have been attending. She repeats the question to her older daughter. My niece doesn’t look up from her book: “Like. Every. Single. Day.” she says with an eye roll and the pauses of a tween fluent with social media.

Patting my older daughter’s thin back as she clings to me, I drop them off in the church basement the following morning. A young woman in jeans and a bright colored T-shirts signs them in. On a table, I see a large flip book with an illustration of a boy from India on the open page.

I did this once, was one of those teenage girls. Back then I was required by the ministry’s leaders to wear a skirt past my knees. I want this for my kids I tell myself. I want them here with their cousins scraping their metal folding chairs and their grandma serving treats at the end, sans the Kool-Aid of my youth. I want them to sing the songs and hear the story about the south Indian child and a Bible story on another flip book.

This is the faith of our family. But my insides squirm at the pressure my kids will feel to profess it.

Some contemporary preachers disparage the language of inviting Jesus into your heart, categorizing it as not biblical. I’m not as disturbed by that—we’re all grasping at metaphors in our relationship with God, although this one may be particularly flimsy.

I also tire of the numbers games in evangelicalism, as if a numeral can fully reflect what God is doing. A newsletter will go out to this ministry’s supporters in the fall reporting that a specific number of children were saved this past summer, and my daughters could join the tally. Although I wonder how many of those children will have invited Jesus into their hearts before, I have to admit that the Bible evidences an appreciation for numeric figures. When the Holy Spirit came down on the disciples at Pentecost after Peter stood up to speak, “about three thousand were added to their number that day.”

My concern is the emphasis on decision. I had a practiced testimony as a teenager—“Well, first, I asked Jesus into my heart at age five when my brother did, but then at age nine, I had a better recognition of my sin, and I did it again, and that’s when I tried harder to live as a Christian.” But it seemed a paltry thing compared to those of adult believers who had once committed the kinds of sins that could make their hearers recoil. As I read my own statement, I recognize the individualism of it now, the dependence on my own work—a statement of decision, and the neglect of a grace that I was raised in a family in which I didn’t have the wounds that come from a dramatic story.

I want my kids here despite the conversation we had in the car before we came in. That former young woman in her long denim skirt would never have dreamed she’d be saying such words to her own children years later.

“Listen,” I say, after I turn off the engine, and swivel my upper body around to face them. “Your teachers in there are probably going to ask you to invite Jesus into your heart, and I want you to know that you don’t have to if you don’t want to.” My younger daughter hears me calmly. She’s strong-minded and able to resist the entreaties of a soft-eyed sixteen-year-old. Not surprisingly, my five-year-old looks puzzled. “We’ve chosen Jesus as a family, and you’ll have other chances to choose Jesus again,” I add.

“Sweetheart, it is a good thing. And if you feel that God is telling you to do it, go ahead. But if you don’t feel like God is telling you to, you can say no thank you.”

They will have their opportunities to choose–if not in this musty basement–in our new church tradition when they decide whether or not to recite the creed on a Sunday or if they would like to undergo confirmation. There will be other times too that I cannot predict. Once in a graduate school, a young man who slipped research articles under my door expressed a romantic interest. I was lonely. But I heard inside of myself in the shower the next morning that I needed to choose Jesus over him. And I knew I did the right thing when he spent an hour that evening arguing reductionisticly that religion and its sources of sacred text cause all the world’s wars.

I believe in a God who speaks to each heart and hears its articulations as he did with mine. He is telling my daughters’ stories, not me. I trust they hear him in ways that I cannot. Until they are ready to profess their faith, may I partner with the Holy Spirit to provide hospitality for his work.

“It is better to have loved and lost than never to have loved at all.”

– Tennyson

I have observed this maxim on many Facebook walls, unsubtly proclaiming the end of another ill fated teenage relationship. Sometimes it is said with care, but often it is said carelessly. It is said as a transition from one coffee-cup conversation to the next with a flip of the hair and a meaningless sigh. You loved. You lost. You move on.

Have you ever had love kick you in the teeth?

Driving is a time of existential contemplation for me. Recently, while driving under a stoplight in a dozy street of the California suburbs a thought came to me as quick as a slap in the face: Have I wasted my love on relationships that only ended in pain?

There have been times where it seemed to me that there was too much losing in the loving. I have spent years loving imperfectly but with great sincerity. Years praying and apologizing, trying to be strong and trying to forgive, and, at last, finding myself several years down the road with nothing to show but a few heart bruises. Perhaps you have experienced it too. Perhaps for you it was a friend, a sibling, a parent, a partner, or a leader, leaving you wondering…

Is it really better to have loved and lost than never to have loved at all?

Those words come from Tennyson’s poem In Memoriam. Contrary to how it is often quoted, it is not in reference to romance. He wrote it after the death of his best friend. It is a deep calls to deep sort of poem. It is a prayer and a wrestling. He grapples with death and life, with love and pain, with doubt and faith. To me the poem is treading water in a sea of grief pleading with God to be kept afloat.

When experiencing pain engendered by love, whether that be grief in death, betrayal, or rejection, the desire to hide is appealing. Instinctively we hear “fooled once shame on them, fooled twice, shame on you.” We feel desperately that we need to build fortified walls to protect us from being that hurt again. We re-calculate, condemning ourselves from being vulnerable enough to be hurt. We cross our hearts and swear to never be so unwise. We say that we will put up “boundaries” to protect our hearts from unhealthy love, but quickly those boundaries become walls of stone with gates of steel. And we do it all because, in our hearts we feel that our love was wasted.

Someone familiar with love and loss, C.S. Lewis wrote of this tension of vulnerability:

“To love at all is to be vulnerable. Love anything and your heart will be wrung and possibly broken. If you want to make sure of keeping it intact you must give it to no one, not even an animal. Wrap it carefully round with hobbies and little luxuries; avoid all entanglements. Lock it up safe in the casket or coffin of your selfishness. But in that casket, safe, dark, motionless, airless, it will change. It will not be broken; it will become unbreakable, impenetrable, irredeemable. To love is to be vulnerable.”

As I’ve pondered the beautiful and truly terrifying reality of the vulnerability in love, I have come to realize that even God is not immune to the pain of love and loss.

The story of God’s relationship to the world is one of unrequited love.

Creation was a lavish expression of a loving God. Beauty, music, green grass, and all the delights the world can offer are God’s offer of love to us. But again and again this love was snubbed by humanity. God, the greatest lover of all, was and is rejected again and again. Perhaps Jesus said it most poignantly as he entered Jerusalem, on his way give himself as an offering for the people he loved:

“Jerusalem, Jerusalem, you who kill the prophets and stone those sent to you,how often I have longed to gather your children together,as a hen gathers her chicks under her wings, and you were not willing.” (Luke 13:34)

God loves because it is His nature. 1 John 4 says “This is love: not that we loved God, but that he loved us…” Love is in God’s DNA, so to speak; “God is love” (1 John 4:8).

God loves extravagantly, but never wastefully.God’s love is never wasted because it is an expression of his perfect character. When we love, we participate with God and reflect his love. John says “No one has ever seen God;but if we love one another, God lives in us and his love is made complete in us.”

Love is never wasted. The act of loving proclaims the truest thing in the universe: that God is love. Our love may be weak, foolish, naive, unwise, or even unhealthy, but it is never ever wasted. Love is the truth that pulses at the heart of reality. It is the lifeblood of every good thing. It does not matter if love is requited, rejected or abandoned; the true meaning of love stems from the God who is love. When we love we affirm and sing into eternity the marvelous and unfathomable truth that God is love, and we are loved.

But, sometimes we do not feel that deep meaning as we struggle with grief, guilt, and pain. In the words of one who seems to always echo my soul’s truest feelings…

You who live in radiance

Hear the prayers of those of us who live in skin

We have a love that’s not as patient as Yours was

Still we do love now and then. (Rich Mullins, “Hard to Get”)

Even in petty and small attempts at love, we allow our hearts to be shaped by love. Though our love may seem not to touch the other person, it shapes us. Love leaves a mark, and sometimes it leaves scars. The greatest love of all bears scars. In Jesus’ resurrected body, he bears the scars of his extravagant love. In those scars I find a forgiveness that fills the cracks of my broken attempts at love, and I find solace in a God who knows what it is to be spurned.

And so, though my soul wrestled that night under the stop light (and many nights before and after), I have come to believe that It truly is better to love and lose than never to love at all.

Love shapes my soul to reach out in grace, forgiveness, and tenderness.

I stand beneath the wisteria laden arch of my auntie’s flat, waiting for Jean to arrive. It’s been over six years since I’ve seen her, and other than the emails over which we’ve exchanged details about this trip, I haven’t really communicated with her either. I close my eyes and try to recall what she looks like. She is the daughter of my grandfather’s cousin. What does that make us? Third cousins? Once removed? Twice? I arch my feet to stand on my toes and crane my neck for a glimpse of her car.

My mother loves Jean and Jean loves history. These are the things I know about her. She’s told me that she has a lot of information on the German Occupation, the five years that Germans controlled the Crown Dependency Island, and that she’ll set up interviews for me with survivors.

I want to be a writer, I tell her over email. No, I correct myself, backspacing it out. I am a writer. I am writing a book about the German Occupation. I look forward to seeing you again. Take care, lots of love, Rachael.

A seagull swoops narrowly close to my head. The thing about being on an island that only unfolds five miles one direction and nine the other is that, even in the most middle point, you are not far enough from the sea. Farmers of the potato fields that cover this middle section like a tightly buttoned coat have to watch out for seagulls, because they will dig up the potato seeds and have them for lunch.

Jean used to take my mother around, when she was growing up, before the island fit her too tightly and she left for England, then for America. She used to pick her up and take her to the zoo or the beach, out for ice cream or for a walk to stretch those legs of my mother’s that always had to be on the move. We stayed with Jean, the last time we came when I was sixteen. Her house smelled like wicker and peonies and she gave me her quiche crust recipe, wrote it out in her handwriting that looked like a computer font.

I step back like I’m surprised when her car whizzes around the corner and into the drive, stopping abruptly seven inches from my toes. She steps—no, bounces—out of the car, saying in a voice that is somehow both singsong and business like, Hello Rachael so sorry I’m late I had to drop of the grandchildren with Jayne-May and went the wrong direction lovely to see you this must be Andrew gosh he is tall, isn’t he right then are you ready to go?

I cannot stop smiling. I suddenly remember her. I say goodbye to Andrew and get into her car. Classical music is playing. She chats the whole way ten minute drive in her cheery, sing song voice, the kind that sounds happy even while describing how she lost her husband, how then her dog Bertie died earlier this year, how lucky she is to be a grandmother.

We pull into her house and it is exactly like I remember: the thick, wooden gate that must be pulled back, the wall of windows that stretches across her dining and living room, the blue kitchen with the yellow lemon table cloth. On the counter, beneath a fly net is a quiche, stuffed with peppers, onion, and lots of cheese, sitting at room temperature.

The table is covered with research she has already done for me: newspaper clippings of stories from the Occupation, books, a milk tin, now empty, that arrived for her mother in 1945 from the Red Cross Vega, the ship that brought nourishment to islanders about to starve.

Outside, the potato farmers till the field in big red machines, “Too heavy,” Jean says as she bustles into the room, carrying plates and a salad she insists I must eat, because lettuce gives her indigestion. “Dad would be rolling over in his grave to see that.”

She pushes her research to the side so that we can eat. She tells me about her walking holidays, asks about my mom, my dad, how the rest of my family is now. “Eat more,” she tells me between sentences as she dishes up another slice of quiche, cut like a pizza, like pie. “You haven’t eaten much.”

After lunch she brings me out a steaming cup of hot tea. She brings one out for herself too, but doesn’t take more than a few sips—when I turn around she is carrying a metal ladder to the conservatory to fix a fallen shade.

She takes shortcake wrapped in doily to Osmond’s, a farmer down the road who I am about to interview. Before we close the gate, she carries a handkerchief full of piecrust crumbs to the back garden. She drops them just before the stonewall and behind the clothesline, to feed her “pet seagull.” We walk and she points out the ocean, her favorite meadow, the woman who lives in that old stone house.

I soak up the presence of this delightful woman, this link to my family history, this woman who knows so much about why I am me.

Falling into step beside her, I realize I do not need the interview to go well for this trip to be worth it.

]]>http://humanepursuits.com/she-knows-why-i-am-me/feed/0Making the Artful Homehttp://humanepursuits.com/making-the-artful-home/
http://humanepursuits.com/making-the-artful-home/#commentsFri, 17 Jul 2015 12:45:40 +0000http://humanepursuits.com/?p=6085I’ve heard my mother describe Mrs. Brenner’s home so often I feel as if I have been there.

But this home of wood floors and lace doilies and ticking grandfather clocks existed in a quiet southeastern Pennsylvania neighborhood in the 1970s—several decades and thousands of miles away from me. If I can’t perfectly imagine the country kitchen, the overstuffed furniture, or the dish of chalky pink mints on the table, I can imagine the feeling of that house.

Mrs. Brenner was my mom’s neighbor when she was in first grade. Mom says she didn’t visit Mrs. Brenner often and didn’t live in that neighborhood long, but Mrs. Brenner’s house made a lifelong impression on her. She tells me she’s been trying to find and replicate that feeling ever since—the feeling that accompanies the smell of fresh coffee and something baking. You can’t put your finger on what makes a house open its arms and pull you close. Mom says there was something in that house that was absent from hers, and it felt like it had been there forever.

The Art of Homemaking

Eleanor Roosevelt famously pioneered a new era of homemaking during the Great Depression, heralding austerity in the culinary and domestic arts. Her bland White House menus of boiled potatoes and low-cost prune pudding disappointed diners and the president alike. But her goal was admirable: prove that low-cost food could be palatable, boost local economies by celebrating American cuisine, and marry homemaking to the realm of science.

Eleanor’s experiment was, in some ways, years ahead of her time. The local food movement today eschews imported luxuries in favor of in-season produce and sustainably-farmed meat. But Eleanor’s goal missed an important element of the human soul, one tied so closely to our pursuits of shelter and sustenance that it survived even the harshness of the Depression. Food and home mean more to us than calories and adequate shelter; we crave that inexpressible comfort that Mrs. Brenner’s home and simple cup of coffee had. Homemaking is scientific, but can’t be reduced to a formula.

Imperfect Beauty

To the unpracticed eye, the comforts of home are hardly noticeable. The things that make a house a home aren’t flashy or fashionable; they don’t call attention to themselves. But their lack is always noticeable, even if we don’t have the words to say what’s missing. Eleanor Roosevelt sought to make homemaking economical by removing the luxury that she knew was inaccessible to the average American, but she forgot that the comforts of home are at once fiercely economical and deliciously luxurious.

Eleanor’s vision of the scientific homemaker is somewhat of a reality today. We homemakers—no longer only women—are often college-educated, and for the most part well aware of the nutrition behind our food and the contents of our household products. And as our housing prices rise and our wages stagnate, we are familiar with forgoing luxury. But my generation is perhaps even more epicurean than our parents, and we’re still searching for that feeling of home.

I find myself thinking more about Mrs. Brenner’s house lately now that I’m a parent. My mom accomplished her goal of mimicking that “forever” feeling in my childhood home (even without the grandfather clock), and I still associate security, comfort, and beauty with that brick farmhouse in rural Idaho.

As a millennial parent, I face the pressures of a demanding peer group. We think we need more, and every walk through the mall reminds us how woefully short of the Pottery Barn showroom our houses and apartments fall. But we came of age during the most dramatic economic collapse since the days that Eleanor served broiled kidneys on toast. Can we also move away from unnecessary luxury, but keep the comforts of home?

Here’s my challenge to myself and my peers: let’s find beauty in the simple home, and art in the science of homemaking. The artful home is far from perfect; it’s the antithesis of the trendy, white-washed showroom. The artful home houses chipped coffee cups in out-of-date cabinets and dollar store frames on thrifted nightstands. It also houses laughter, late-night glasses of wine, hard conversations on the patio, and countless hours of beautiful everyday life.

We can give our children homes that celebrate beauty and reject overpriced “perfection.” We can embrace the art of the everyday in our homes, creating the timeless warmth of a well-appointed house without the trends of the showroom.

A jaunt to the mountains is always a good idea. I especially like it when I want to interrogate God about the direction of my life, while also letting him know I’m a little miffed with the current particulars. Several weeks back, I was befuddled in soul so I packed my faithful blue hatchback and headed for the hills. I stayed in a mountain cabin with airy rooms, a steady supply of coffee, and a dimly lighted little porch just shaped for hours of brooding. My plan was to do quiet, restorative things: read, take very gentle hikes, and generally make enough quiet space in my brain for God to speak some…encouragement? Direction? Anything would do.

But the resting was not to be. I don’t know what possessed me, but I spent most of my time acting like a mountain goat. I hiked every trail in reach. My cabin, set right at the feet of great, jutting boulders in the foothill valley that flanks Pikes Peak, was perfect for meditation, prayer, and…climbing. In my heart and feet was an insatiable desire and a restless energy that set me on a series of long scrambles up red, muddy hillsides, out onto craggy, storm-shadowed cliff edges in quest of, well, I wasn’t sure what. A deeper drink of storm sky. A wider view. An end to my fitful thoughts.

But my thoughts were tenser than ever by that afternoon when I hiked up the top ledge of a canyon. I had checked my trail guide and thought I would be out for a short, easy climb. I must have missed the turn because an hour in, I was still going up, too far to turn back but flummoxed as to where the downward road might be. I stopped to check my map and noticed abruptly how the air had pooled and stilled and the sky turned an ominous grey. The hot, pin-drop silence of air just before thunder filled the woods and then was shattered by a terrific crack. Great. Every mountain dweller has a cache of people-being-struck-by-lightning stories. I was pretty sure I was about to become the stuff of legend.

Can we have our bacon and eat it too?

Our modern food movement isn’t working, saysPacific Standard writer James McWilliams: even though “muckrakers have been exposing every hint of corruption in corporate agriculture” and “reformers have been busy creating programs to combat industrial agriculture with localized, ‘real food’ alternatives,” factory farms are bigger and busier than ever—in fact, they’re “proliferating like superweeds in a field of Monsanto corn.”

The total number of livestock on the largest factory farms rose by 20 percent between 2002 and 2012.

The number of dairy cows on factory farms doubled, and the average-sized dairy factory farm increased by half, between 1997 and 2012.

The number of hogs on factory farms increased by more than one-third, and the average farm size swelled nearly 70 percent from 1997 to 2012.

The number of broiler chickens on factory farms rose nearly 80 percent from 1997 to 2012, to more than 1 billion.

The number of egg-laying hens on factory farms increased by nearly one quarter from 1997 to 2012, to 269 million.

It seems that, as McWilliams puts it, the sustainable food movement has “hit the brick wall of economic reality.” Despite the efforts of food reformers like Michael Pollan or Joel Salatin, factory-farmed meats and dairy are still just plain cheaper. “To most people, even ethically concerned food people, blueberries are just blueberries,” writes McWilliams. “Food is just food.”

But of course the deeper problem here is that food is not just food—it’s a piece of a larger structure of economy, ecosystem, and community. And the blossoming prosperity of factory farms is not, in fact, a normal or organic outgrowth of free-market demand: it is an artificial construct, a bloated system sustained by government subsidies, crop insurance, and regulatory supports. This should be made clear by the fact that, even as the locavore/farm-to-fork movement has swelled considerable over the past seven to 10 years, these factory farms are still doing incredibly well.

The federal government bolsters large farms and turns a blind eye to their environmental detriments (detailed at length in the Food and Water Watch report), while dis-incentivizing—and even crippling—smaller farms. As the report puts it, Big Ag corporations foster “an intensely consolidated landscape where a few giant agribusinesses exert tremendous pressure on livestock producers to become larger and more intensive.”

Heavily-subsidized corn becomes cheap feed for malnourished, maltreated cattle, as “misguided farm policy [has] encouraged over-production of commodity crops such as corn and soybeans, which artificially depressed the price of livestock feed and created an indirect subsidy to factory farm operations.”

Factory farmers don’t have to worry about their manure lagoons, so they cram as many beef cattle as possible onto their land: “lax environmental rules and lackluster enforcement allowed factory farms to grow to extraordinary sizes without having to properly manage the overwhelming amount of manure they create.”

McWilliams looks at the current situation, and suggests taking extreme measures: “Begin with animal domestication. It’s got to go. Given the centrality of animal products to industrial agriculture (and many other industries), to attack the raising and slaughtering of animals would be a far more effective way to change our food system than localizing meat production or attempting to alter the manner of domestication.”

But when one considers the strong (even fierce) consumer preference for meat, as well as the entire systems of industry and agriculture that rotate around it, it becomes clear that this plan of action would never sell. It could also have harsh consequences for the farmer and land, as author and farmer Shannon Hayes explains in this paper defending small-scale livestock farming.

McWilliam’s problem is that he is only looking at one tier of a much more complicated, layered problem. Fixing America’s food system cannot just be done at the consumer level: with our current system of artificial prices, bloated benefits, and thinly-veiled cronyism, there’s little the consumer can do long-term to fix the problem. Consumers may demand free-range eggs—but factory farms will respond by relegating a few thousand of their conventionally-farmed chickens to a “free range” area, in order to cater to that niche in the market (as Daniel Sumner explains in this EconTalk on the political economy of agriculture). Their overall practices will not change, and any money used to buy those “free-range” eggs will just flow back into the pockets of the industrial farmer.

Being well-informed and shopping locally, via CSAs or farmer’s markets, can help. But it can also be very expensive, and thus turns the sustainable “food movement” into an upper or upper-middle class issue, one to which lower-income citizens have little to no access.

On the other hand, by tackling the cronyism and regulatory system that undergirds our agriculture, we can shift the economic battle to the political sphere and push for change beyond the grocery shelves, looking to the core policy issues that push back any “change” we’re able to achieve.

This could involve fighting for local food freedom, as folks in Wyoming have currently—thus taking some of the price power out of the hands of large farmers and gives it back to small, local operations, and countering the difficulty McWilliams addresses when he notes that factory-farmed food is always cheaper.

Change may also necessarily involve the establishment of some environmental measures to crack down on the extreme pollution and maltreatment of land that is currently allowed in factory farms, as Food and Water Watch’s report argues.

But it is important to note that our current situation—undesired as it is by a growing number of consumers, costly as it is long-term for land, animal, and person—cannot be sustained without artificial incentives and consumer ignorance. By fixing the first politically, we may in fact find it easier to fix the second organically, bit by bit. This may help fix the problem that McWilliams is addressing—while still allowing consumers to have their bacon and eat it, too.